The Mad and the MacAbre (28 page)

No one can know, Jenny’s voice repeated in
his head. None of us can ever leave here.

What did they find in this cavern?

There can be no forgiveness. There can be no
more hope.

“
You don’t know what you’re
doing,” Levi said. He rolled to a crouch and tensed in preparation
of launching himself at Gabriel. “You don’t understand. No one can
find out about this place. Ever.”

Gabriel didn’t want to ask the words that
came out of his mouth next, but he had to know. He needed to hear
it.

“
Did you kill my sister?
Did you kill Stephanie?”

The expression of anger on Levi’s face never
faltered.

“
She would have
told.”

Gabriel felt his heart break, and in that
instant he wanted nothing more than to shoot Levi in the face. Not
just shoot him, but destroy him, obliterate every last inch of
him.

“
For God spared not the
angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them
into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment,” Levi
said.

Jess drew close to Gabriel and stood at his
side. She raised her rifle and pointed it at Levi.

“
Do you think we wanted
this burden?” Levi asked. “Without faith there can be no God, and
without God there can be no hope. What would happen if you stole
the hopes of millions, the hope for the entire world?” He pulled a
long, serrated hunting knife from his jacket pocket. “There would
be no reason to exist.”

“
Don’t move!” Gabriel
shouted.

“
If you kill me, the
responsibility falls to you.”

Levi adjusted his grip on the hilt of the
knife. The blade pointed downward from his closed fist.

“
Don’t,” Jess said. Her
voice quivered.

“
Once you’ve looked upon
the face of God, there’s nothing left to live for but the
perpetuation of the lie. The lie upon which all of our lives are
built. Everything’s a lie! The bible?” He scoffed. “That’s what led
us here. To the fallen angels. They were right where it said they’d
be.”

“
You’re insane,” Gabriel
said. Something had broken inside Levi’s mind, splintered into
incoherent pieces. There were no angels and this had nothing to do
with God. This man had killed his sister and her friends. His own
father, for Christ’s sake!

“
Drop the knife,” Gabriel
said.

“
I can’t let you leave
here. No one can ever learn the truth.”

Levi sprung from his haunches like a
panther. Gabriel saw a flash of reflected fire from the blade of
the knife, the crazed look on the younger man’s face. Wide eyes.
Screaming. Gabriel pulled the trigger at the same moment Levi
slammed into him. The rifle clattered from his grasp and Levi’s
weight drove him to the ground. His head slammed against the rock
floor. He barely had time to throw his hands up to ward off the
coming attack.

Another flash from the knife and Levi raised
it high over his shoulder.

Gabriel grabbed for it, but it was well
outside his reach.

A small shape leapt from the pile of rocks
and landed on Levi’s back. He whirled in surprise and a flurry of
claws tore into his cheek. Hissing and slashing, Oscar turned the
entire right side of Levi’s face to a sheet of blood before he was
able to grab the tabby by the scruff of the neck and hurl it
against the wall.

By the time Levi turned back to Gabriel,
Jess had brought the barrel of her rifle to bear on his
forehead.

There was no look of fear on Levi’s face.
Only resignation. Or perhaps relief.

One second Levi’s head was there, the next
it was gone, and Gabriel was wiping warm fluid from his eyes. The
body wobbled and then fell down onto him.

Gabriel tried to scream, but his mouth was
full of Levi’s blood.

He scurried out from under the corpse and
looked up at Jess, who stood frozen in place, a twirl of smoke
rising from the barrel of the rifle, her face pale.

The weapon fell from her hands.

***

Cavenaugh burned where he had fallen. There
was nothing left of his clothing but ash and charcoal, and his skin
had already blackened and cracked. He still held his sister’s
rigid, clawed hand within his own.

Gabriel had to look away. The beauty was
painful to behold.

Jess took his hand. He had never been so
grateful for such a simple gesture in his life. So many years of
constant torture and longing and hoping, and now it was over.

Now he would have to truly mourn the loss of
his sister. No more deluding himself, no more hoping for a miracle.
He faced the daunting task of collecting her remains and committing
her to the earth in the Christian fashion she would have
wanted.

There was so much death. All around him. So
much loss. And for what?

Oscar limped away from the cavern wall. His
right rear leg was broken in such a horrible way that it pointed
straight behind him like a second tail.

Gabriel crouched and held out his hand,
which only startled Oscar, and sent him hopping deeper into the
cavern.

“
Damn it,” Gabriel
said.

He released Jess’s hand, walked into the
smoldering fire, and found where they had abandoned the lantern.
When he turned, he could read the expression on Jess’s face, but he
couldn’t forsake the cat now. Oscar was the only part of his sister
left in this world. The tabby had saved him. It was only right that
he return the favor.

Raising the lantern, he staggered away from
the smoke and flames, the scent of burning flesh, and pressed
further into the mountain.

***

Gabriel felt dead inside. The sense of loss
he now experienced, the horror over so much death, was sending him
into a state of shock. He could only focus on finding the cat. Once
he had done so, he knew he would fall apart.

His legs moved of their own volition,
leading him into the rapidly cooling depths of the earth. The air
was still and dusty, as though even the breeze feared to violate
the darkness. After several minutes, or it could have been hours,
of stumbling on numb legs, he found himself before another
collapsed section of the tunnel. There was only a small black gap
between the rocks and the ceiling through which to crawl.
Considering he hadn’t encountered the cat, that left only one
option.

He turned at the sound of footsteps to find
Jess staring at him with the same distant expression he was sure he
must have worn. Without a word, he started climbing the haphazard
pile of stones. He held the lantern out before him and slithered
through the gap.

I will sit also upon the mount of the
congregation, in the sides of the north.

His mind failed to rationalize the scene
before him as he descended the other side. The flickering lamplight
played off a rounded chamber, only rather than highlighting the
imperfections on a granite surface, it died on smooth walls thick
with a layer of dust. Cobwebs were strung from the ceiling and
walls as though some great spider had filled the room with an
intricate network of webs. The dust in the air hung like a mist.
Suddenly Gabriel felt as though he couldn’t breathe.

Thou hast walked up and down in the midst of
the stones of fire.

He raised his other arm and brushed away the
cobwebs, which clung to his skin and jacket.

“
What is this place?” Jess
whispered from behind him. She reached to her left and ran her hand
along a straight edge that resembled the side of a doorway. Her
hand came away gray with dust, but the surface she had just cleared
shone like stainless steel.

Thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the
sides of the pit.

Gabriel turned back to the room before him
and held up the lantern. The walls weren’t as smooth as he had
initially thought. He walked all the way across the chamber and
brushed off another section of the wall to reveal an instrument
panel with a flat-screen display, beneath which was a series of
buttons resembling a keyboard.

His heart was pounding so hard he could hear
his pulse.

He was cast out into the earth, and his
angels were cast out with him.

Gabriel headed left, the ground beneath him
making a sound like buckling metal under his weight. The lamp
highlighted several large mounds of dust-covered debris in the
middle of the room. As he approached, the lantern drew contrast on
the shapes. It looked like a cluster of high-backed chairs with
headrests and—

There was a crackling noise ahead of him and
a soft meow.

Gabriel followed the sound around the first
seat and glanced down at it. There was Oscar, curled up not on the
chair, but on a pair of spindly, desiccated legs. The cat looked up
at him, the reflections from his eyes twin golden halos.

Jess drew a sharp inhalation.

Gabriel followed the legs to a collapsed
abdomen. The hip bones poked through the mummified gray flesh. A
five-point harness crossed a bare chest, thick with dust. The
parchment skin peeled away from the buckle to reveal the thin
manila bones of a ribcage.

For God spared not the angels that
sinned…

He reached across the harness with a
trembling hand and tipped the head up by the chin.

“
Oh my God,” Jess
whispered.

Gabriel couldn’t find any words for the face
upon which he now stared.

…
but cast them down to
hell…

The orbital sockets were far too large,
ovular rather than circular, and set too low on the face, to
creating an abnormally long and broad forehead. The eyes themselves
were absent and the skin had peeled away from the deep black pits.
A triangular ridge of bone between them formed a nose far too small
for the face. And beneath was a thin mouth. The lips had shriveled
and retracted from the bared teeth, which were small like kernels
of corn to fit the tiny mouth. There was only a bump of bone at the
base of the weak chin.

…
and delivered them into
chains of darkness…

He wanted to jerk his hand back, but he
couldn’t tear his gaze from the face.

The bible had led his sister and her friends
to the location where the angels that had been cast out of heaven
struck the earth.

…
to be reserved unto
judgment.

Where they were bound for all eternity, not
in chains of darkness, but in their harnesses.

He understood now the secret that had been
important enough to kill to protect.

No one can know, Jenny had said. None of us
can ever leave here.

Their entire existence was built upon the
perpetuation of a lie.

There can be no forgiveness. There can be no
more hope.

These weren’t just the fallen angels of
Christian lore, the defeated faction from the insurgence in heaven,
that his sister and her friends had found high on the northern
slope of the mountain after following the stones of fire into the
very mouth of hell.

The face into which he now stared was not
that of a mystical angel, but that of a being from another world
entirely. A being whose existence had provided the foundation for
the greatest lie ever told, a lie upon which countless lives
depended.

“
It doesn’t even look
human,” Jess whispered. “What do you think it is?”

“
An angel.”

“
If this is an angel,
then…”

Her voice faded to nothingness.

Gabriel turned away from the remains, looked
into her eyes, and finished her thought for her.

“
Then what the hell is
God?”

Epilogue

Jess held Gabriel’s hand as together they stood
before the crimson spring, looking up toward the mountain peak
where the cross had been erected to memorialize their vanished
siblings. They had just mounted another placard beneath the first
to commemorate the more recent lives that had been lost in the
search for their missing family members. The warm June sun shined
down on them in slanted rays through the wavering branches of the
ponderosa pines. Only spotted patches of snow remained beneath the
densest thickets. Otherwise, the ground was dry, the kindling and
leaves crackling as they rustled on the slight breeze. Soon enough,
the rains would come, heralding winter’s inevitable return. This
was their window of opportunity.

The Search & Rescue copper had airlifted
them down from the mountain the following day as soon as the storm
had broken. Jess and Gabriel had joined the police, FBI, and
countless volunteers over the ensuing week in a futile search for
Maura Aragon, Brent Cavenaugh, Will Farnham, and Kelsey Northcutt.
None of their bodies were ever found and they were eventually
written off as victims of the cruel mountain and the wicked storm.
It happens in the Rocky Mountains every year, the authorities had
said. Eventually, their remains would be found.

Gabriel was certain they never would.

They had rolled a number of stones into the
hole above the spring where Oscar had entered, sealed it with
gravel and dirt, and wedged the largest stone they could lift over
the top. That had been two days ago. Ever since, they had done
nothing but roll boulder after boulder into the spring to block off
the underwater tunnel. The red water now overflowed the granite
banks and cut twin streams to either side down the slope.

No one would ever again set foot inside that
mountain. No one would ever learn the secret that had cost so many
lives. The lies would pass through countless more generations, but
hope would persevere as a corollary of the deception.

Levi had been wrong.

Stephanie would never have told. To her,
hope and faith were synonymous.